Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

182Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsfor example, that good and evil are human creations; that “Satanic” is just aname humans have given to such behaviour that disrupts their conception oforderly existence. 46 Nature itself is described as amoral, more prone to beesteemed by aesthetic criteria than by ethical ones. The demonic elements inthe series are connected to an ideological structure, which emphasises theexistence of destructive and chaotic potentials as parts of nature. The centralmetaphor is that of a “Savage Garden.”If “our conversation” [between Lestat and his mortal friend, Nicolas]could only continue.Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an unchartedland where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferentparadise without signposts of evil or good.In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art– the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeurof Fragonard’s canvases – beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawlessas the earth had been eons before man had one single coherentthought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beautywas a Savage Garden. [...]Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better,really, than the Savage Garden. 47It is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world areeternally justified,” is the way that Nietzsche formulated this principle. 48Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is packed with demonic metaphors and images,and he is very useful in pointing out the paradoxes and tensions thattypically motivate the use of them. “Whatever exists is both just and unjust,and equally justified in both,” was his formulation of the tragic conflict. 49 Ihave above (in chapter two) read the ambiguity of the Nietzschean position,the simultaneous acceptance and recognition of contradictory opposites. Inmorality, this amounts to the necessary recognition that value-systems arebased on human “myths,” and (simultaneously) that such myths are essentialfor our existence.The central problem in the Vampire Chronicles is analogous to the onepresented by Nietzsche. Rice’s modern vampires like Lestat believe in theSavage Garden – a reality without any inherent “meaning” – but they simultaneouslyare driven by their “desire for knowledge” to find some significantmyth. The endless dialectic of new questions and answers creates a particularversion of Carroll’s “erotetic narration.” Even if morality is just a human in-46 VL, 334. – The view of morality as a construction is linked with Nietzsche’s name;the view itself, however, has been common enough. In H. Rider Haggard’s She(1886/1926, 153) Ayesha ponders: “My life has perchance been evil – I knew not, forwho can say what is evil and what good?” Earlier on, the narrator had confirmed that themorality was “an affair of latitude and religion, and what is right in one place, wrong andimproper in another” (ibid., 87).47VL, 131.48 Nietzsche 1872/1967, 52 [§ V].49Nietzsche 1872/1990, 65 [§ IX].